What does it mean to be made in the image of God?
Last week, I blogged about some of the ways that theologians have tried to answer that question:
The Image of God: Framing the Issues
The Image of God: A Covenantal Proposal
Today, I preached on the subject: “Image is Everything: An Introduction to the Image of God.” Continue reading
Perhaps more than any other place in Scripture, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 provides a ‘definition’ of the gospel. He writes,
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
As Paul closes out his first letter to the church at Corinth, he reminds those who have received the gospel to continue to stand in the gospel. But even more than reminding them of the gospel that they know, he reiterates the four main events of the gospel–Christ’s death, burial, resurrection, and glorious appearing—so that they (and we) will might delight in the feast of knowing the triune God.
Soli Deo Gloria, dss
Last Sunday, I began a series on the gospel—what it is, what it isn’t. Much has been written about ‘the gospel’ in the last few years. This sermon series is my attempt to help our church fall in love with the gospel all over again.
Over the course of the next two months, I hope to tackle a number facets about the gospel and to help our church to stand firm in the gospel of Jesus Christ. If the subject of the gospel interests you—as it does the angels in heaven (1 Pet 1:12)—please check back to hear the audio and/or leave a note. I’d love to keep up the conversation with you.
Here is a rough outline of what we will cover in the days ahead.
1. The Power of the Gospel (Romans 1:16-17)
The Good News in Time and Eternity
2. The Eternal Gospel (Revelation 14:6; cf. Genesis 3:15; Revelation 21-22)
3. The Gospel Beforehand (Galatians 3:8; Genesis 22)
4. The Gospel Fulfilled (1 Corinthians 15:1-8)
The Good News of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
5. The Triune Gospel of the Kingdom (Mark 1:1-15)
6. The Gospel of God (Romans 1:7; cf. 2:16; 10:16; 11:28; 1 Corinthians 4:15)
7.The Gospel of God’s Glory (1 Timothy 1:8-11; cf. 2 Corinthians 4:4)
8. The Gospel of Christ’s Cross (2 Thessalonians 1:8; cf. Romans 1:9; 15:19; 1 Corinthians 9:12; 2 Corinthians 2:12; 9:13; 10:14; Galatians 1:7; Philippians 1:27; 1 Thessalonians 3:2)
9. The Gospel of Christ’s Resurrection (Preaching in Acts)
10. The Gospel of the Spirit’s Grace (Acts 20:24)
11. The Gospel of the Spirit’s Gospel of Truth (Colossians 1:5; Ephesians 1:13; cf. Galatians 2:14)
The Good News in the Church
12. The Preached Gospel (1 Thessalonians 2:1-20)
13. The Church’s Gospel (Ephesians 3:6-7; 1 Timothy 3:15)
14. The Fruit of the Gospel (Philippians 1:27)
15. The Passion of the Gospel (Colossians 1:24ff.; cf. Philippians 1:12; Philemon 13; Ephesians 3:1; cf. 1 Corinthians 9:12; 23)
16. ‘My’ gospel (Romans 2:16; 16:25; Galatians 1:8, 9; 2 Timothy 2:8; cf. Galatians 1:6; 2 Corinthians 11:4)
If you are interested in keeping up, here is the first message: “The Gospel: God’s Power to Save.”
Soli Deo Gloria, dss
If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work? (Prov 24:10-12)
Last Sunday night (January 20), our church (Calvary Baptist Church, Seymour, Indiana) heard a powerful message from Dr. Denny Burk, a professor at Boyce College, associate pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church, and a perceptive blogger, journal editor, and author (see his forthcoming What is the Meaning of Sex? )
Basing his message on Proverbs 24:10-12, Denny’s sermon is a clarion call for men and women to get involved in the greatest civil rights issue of our generation. In it, Denny challenges all those who love the gospel of Jesus Christ to (1) Forsake Cowardice, (2) Rescue the Perishing, and (3) Reject Excuses.
Then in a time of Q & A (starting at 59:45), Denny tackled the issues concerning Hobby Lobby, Obamacare, and other matters pertaining to religious liberty.
The sermon and the Q & A lasts about 90 minutes, and is worth your time! Pass it on to others, and stand up to “rescue those who are being taken away to death!”
Hold Them Back (Prov 24:10-12) MP3
Soli Deo Gloria, dss
Sunday by Sunday, faithful pastors labor to uphold the glory of God in the face of Christ, but such labors can often be overwhelming. I have garnished much encouragement that this wearying task is not something that only a few experienced. Rather, any who desire to walk faithfully with Lord will wrestle with sorrow, fatigue, feelings (and realities) of inadequacy, and the like.
David experienced this. In Psalm 139, he is undergoing some sort of adversarial assault. Those who surround him are accusing him, attacking him, and/or perhaps questioning his leadership, integrity, or faithfulness. Maybe some pastors can relate. What does he do? He spends eighteen verses recounting the glorious truths of God’s knowledge, presence, and power. Only then does he ask God for protection and deliverance from these enemies. In the end, he lets the trial he is facing to be a source of purification. He once again submits himself to God’s opinion and judgment. He is a man whose center holds, because he has made God the center of his life.
As I prepared Psalm 139 last week I remembered John Piper’s words to pastors taken from his biography of Charles Spurgeon. Ten years ago, I was given a cassette tape (remember those) of that Spurgeon message. I listened to it numerous times, long before I ever was in ministry. However, the words heard many years ago still resound in my mind and have more relevance and weight to them today then they did then. Pastor, let his words remind you that as you uphold the gospel, God himself upholds you!
Preaching great and glorious truth in an atmosphere that is not great and glorious is an immense difficulty. To be reminded week in and week out that many people regard your preaching of the glory of the grace of God as hypocrisy pushes a preacher not just into the hills of introspection, but sometimes to the precipice of self-extinction.
I don’t mean suicide. I mean something more complex. I mean the deranging inability to know any longer who you are. What begins as a searching introspection for the sake of holiness, and humility gradually becomes, for various reasons, a carnival of mirrors in your soul: you look in one and you’re short and fat; you look in another and you’re tall and skinny; you look in another and you’re upside down. And the horrible feeling begins to break over you that you don’t know who you are any more. The center is not holding. And if the center doesn’t hold—if there is no fixed and solid “I” able to relate to the fixed and solid “Thou,” namely, God, then who will preach next Sunday?
When the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:10, “By the grace of God, I am what I am,” he was saying something utterly essential for the survival of preachers in adversity. If, by grace, the identity of the “I”—the “I” created by Christ and united to Christ, but still a human “I”—if that center doesn’t hold, there will be no more authentic preaching, for there will be no more authentic preacher, but a collection of echoes.
O how fortunate we are, brothers of the pulpit, that we are not the first to face these things! I thank God for the healing history of the power of God in the lives of saints. I urge you for the sake of your own survival: live in other centuries and other saints.
Father, let those who uphold the word tomorrow do so upheld by the power of your Spirit and the promise that your word NEVER EVER returns void (Isa 55:10-11).
Soli Deo Gloria, dss
Asking the question, what are preachers sent to do, Doug Wilson gives a powerful and clear answer in his Desiring God message from 2009. Here is what he says,
We are not sent to preach a distant star or moon. We are sent to preach a blazing sun that lights and heats every creature, that dominates all things, and around which everything else must necessarily revolve.
We are not sent to make a few mild suggestions. We are not sent to have a relational dialogue. We are sent to preach and to declare. We are commissioned—ordained—to compel every manifestation of worldly power, glory, wisdom, and exaltation to yield to and obey God’s word.
We come to declare that all men need to repent and believe. The kingdom of God is here. We declare what has been accomplished, not what we would like to be accomplished. We are ordained to feed the sheep and drive away the wolves. And if needs be, we have been ordained to preach the word as if we were thunder and lightening. How can we not? The Scriptures themselves are thunder and lightning.
God, help us pastors and preachers as we deliver your Word tomorrow. May it strike with the power and precision of a lightning strike, and may the world know that you are speaking. May the light of Christ illumine our minds and shine forth in our messages so that your people will turn from their sin and flee to their Savior.
Let us Proclaim Christ, dss
These are a shadow of the things to come,
but the substance belongs to Christ.
Colossians 2:17
Here is a PDF that I put together that gives a series of biblical texts that flesh out the Gospel-Positioning System I described yesterday. They each start in the law of Moses (Exodus 30-31); they move through the prophets to Christ and the message of the gospel that is foreshadowed in the various elements described in Exodus.
Exodus 30-31: Miscellaneous Instructions That Shadow The Messiah
Soli Deo Gloria, dss
When Having a GPS Makes All the Difference
A few months ago, our family traveled to Chicago. Somewhere near Indianapolis, we learned that there was a major accident on the highway in front of us. Fortunately, we had the information ahead of time and were able to get off the interstate in time to miss the heavy traffic. Or so we thought.
Misjudging the exits, we got caught with all the other cars and trucks on a side road. Nevertheless, we still had our GPS. With our global positioning device we were able once again to get off the side road and find our way on a dirt road back to the highway.
Certainly when we set out for Chicago, we did not expect ourselves to be traveling on a dust-covered dirt road in the middle of an Indiana cornfield. And yet that was exactly where we were. It was a place that was totally unfamiliar to us, and one that without the GPS we would have no idea where we were.
I think this is often how we feel when we open up the Bible. Seeking to get to the City of God, namely Jesus Christ, books that contain instructions for bodily discharges (Leviticus 15) and chapters that describing flying scrolls (Zechariah 4) can seem as out of place as the road we found in Northern Indiana.
What we need when we get into the more “remote” places in the Bible is what we have in the car. We need a positioning device that will help explain how to get from our current location–Exodus 31, Leviticus 15, or Judged 19 to Christ. What we need is a Gospel-Positioning System. Anyone know where to find one of those?
I didn’t. But this week, I have attempted to put something together that may function like that. It has six steps, and it serves as a general rule of thumb for getting from obscure OT laws all the way to Christ. It’s aim is to avoid the traps of hasty application and mere moralizing. It’s goal is to find Christ in all Scripture, but not by making strange leaps and speculative links. Rather, its aim is to follow the flow of redemptive history and present a gospel-patterened schematic (another GPS), that can benefit any reader of Scripture.
Redemptive Roadmap: Gospel-Positioning System
1. Law. In the law, you find instructions for living in ancient Israel. These rules and commands were part of the covenant framework of Israel. They were given so that people could live in God’s presence. They were also given, so that the people with sinful hearts would learn that they needed something greater. In both cases, they were designed to point people to God–to his holiness and his mercy. They list the standard expectations of God, and they point out our failures. (Romans 3:20; 5:20; Gal 3:21)
2A. Prophets (1). Next, when Israel broke the law, God sent prophets to warn and later condemn Israel. The purpose of the prophets was to incite repentance, but knowing the hearts of the people, God also sent his prophets to pronounce judgment (Jeremiah 25:4-5; 26:4-6).
2B. Prophets (2). At the same time that he sent prophets to proclaim judgment, he also sent prophets with a message of hope and salvation. These prophets were given to Israel to point them to the Messiah who was to come (1 Pet 1:10-12).
Together, the prophets proclaim a message of salvation through judgment. But this is only takes us to the end of the Old Testament. These first three steps are what Mark Dever calls Promises Made. What comes next are Promises Kept.
3. Christ. God’s word of hope is always fulfilled in Christ. He is the end of the law, and he is the one who fulfills all the predictions of the prophets. He is the long awaited Messiah, and all the promises of God are yes and amen in him. Thus he is the center of all the Bible. (2 Corinthians 1:20).
4. The Gospel. Finding Christ in Scripture brings you to the door of the gospel. The only question that remains is what will you do when you come to Christ? Will you simply try to imitate his life and work? Or will you humble yourself, repent of your sin, and believe that his obedient life and substitutionary death have effected your good standing before God? If the latter, you have followed the Gospel-Positioning System to the right address. You have found rest in Christ.
This is so vital, because so often we can miss Christ and the gospel, especially when we begin in the OT. Too many Bible-believing Christians and preachers miss Christ and settle for moral lessons and spiritual examples in the Old Testament . But to do this ignores the way the way Christ intended for us to read Scripture (John 5:39; Luke 24:27, 45-49).
How does this kind of reading differ? Well, a GPS reading of the Old Testament moves from the text, through redemptive history, to Jesus Christ. Call it Christotelic if you like. A GPS reading also sees how the Law is fulfilled (Rom 10:4) and the Prophets realized in Jesus Christ (Rom 15:4), and makes us all wise unto salvation (2 Tim 3:14-16). It does not take the short-cut to Jesus, but it follows the long road through the Scriptures until it comes to faith and repentance in Christ. And then from there it calls us to action.
5. Christian Application. Once we have rested our heart, soul, mind, and strength in the completed work Christ has done for us, then we are ready for action. This is what Paul calls “Faith working itself out in love” (Gal 5:6). It always flows out of the gospel, and it is also energized by the gospel. It is filled with love and good works, but they are works that do not justify. They are works that testify to the grace of God and the love of his Son.
A Final Caveat
Now let me say it: This is cheesy. Any time you devise a system for reading the Bible, you are in danger of draining its spiritual power. Any time the Spirit who leads us into all truth is replaced by a systematic method, something of the life of the reading experience is lost. I get that.
Nevertheless, I am willing to take a risk, because for too long, too many people have read “by the Spirit” and have totally missed Christ, or just treated parts of the OT like ancietn ancestors. They may be necessary for my existence, but I don’t know or care anything about them.
With that real danger in place, I think that memorizing this 5-fold pattern can make you and I far better readers of Scripture. By seeing how the law was given to increase our trespass (1), to heighten our condemnation and our need (2A), to point to a later, greater hope (2B), to finally culminate in Christ (3), to trust in him and his work (4), and to live according to the gospel he proclaims (5), that I believe, will not have a spiritually-stultifying effect. Rather, it will help our minds better understand the long history of the redemptive history, and how to get from places like Exodus 31 and Leviticus 15 all the way to Christ.
Tell me what you think! Is this is a helpful tool? What would you add? Edit? What else needs to be said?
Soli Deo Gloria, dss
After Paul addresses his audience and touches on creation, he moves to the heart of the gospel: the desperate lostness of fallen sinners and the compassionate grace of God to provide redemption in Jesus Christ. Here is the second part of my exposition on Paul’s sermon in Acts 13:
Redemption is the theme of the Bible, and in Abraham redemption begins to take shape. God who made mankind in his image, to bear his likeness, and rule his creation, is now restoring a people for himself. Mankind by way of deception sinned against God, incurred his judgment, and fell under the thralldom of sin and Satan and incurred the righteous judgment of death and damnation (cf. Gen. 3; Rom. 5:12-21). Yet, from the first sin in the garden forward, YHWH has been seeking to save a people for himself (Gen. 3:15), and the covenant with Abraham is the first official announcement of such good news (cf. Gal. 3:8). (The covenant with Noah, though necessary for salvation history to continue, preserves humanity more than it promises redemption).
Moving forward in Paul’s sermon, the great apostle emphasizes the shape of redemption in the story of the Exodus. Paul recounts Israel’s captivity in Egypt and speaks of “the uplifted arm” that delivered the people of Israel from Pharaoh’s afflictions (Acts 13:17). The uplifted arm pictures both Moses lifting the staff at the Red Sea (Ex. 14:6) and more powerfully the effect of God’s righteous right arm which promised salvation for Israel (Ex. 6:6; cf. Isa. 51:5; 52:10; 59:16)—the first connection is literal and historic, the second is an anthropomorphism but just as historic.
Paul goes on to rehearse the salvation history of Israel (Acts 13:18ff). He recounts God’s patient endurance in the wilderness, his powerful leadership in the entry and conquest into the promised land. He references the destruction of the nations (v.18), the exaltation of Israel (v. 19), the cycle of disobedience, judgment, contrition, and deliverance through a God-ordained mediator, and the painful return to disobedience found in Judges (v. 20), and finally the establishment of the king (v.21). The arrival of the king is a fulfillment of kingdom promises in the Torah; it is also the high point of Israel history, one that would establish an everlasting covenant for David’s descendent to reign on the throne (2 Sam. 7), and one that would permanently guarantees YHWH’s provision of such a king (cf. Is. 9:6-7; 11:1-10; Dan. 2:44-45; etc. ). Though this kingdom tottered and fell, the Messianic promises remain and have now been fulfilled in Christ (v. 23). This leads Paul to his next phase in his sermon.
Moving from ancient Scripture to the recent events of the Messianic fulfillment, Paul recalls the ministry of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ. Verse 23 is the culminating verse, “From the descendents of this man, according to promise, God has brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus!” Surely the Jewish segment of Paul’s audience would have been tracking with him through the history of Israel, some may have even granted him the inclusion of John the Baptist, but when he turned to Jesus Christ, he was submitting a whole new chapter in the history of God and his revelation. Yet, this is clearly the final crescendo in God’s master symphony. Jesus Christ came as the son of Abraham and the son of David (Matt. 1:1), the recipient of all the promises and the royal son who would sit on the throne of David. He obeyed all the law and thus upheld the covenant long since broken by the rest of Israel (Matt. 5:17-18). In this Paul upholds Jesus as the perfect Israelite who ratified the covenant with YHWH and made a way of salvation for his brethren.
Then Paul, capturing the attention of his audience again, (v. 26), declaims how Jesus was misunderstood, how the Scriptures well-known and well-read in Jerusalem were dismissed concerning Jesus, and how the leaders sought to dispatch of this unruly prophet. Paul recounts the suffering, crucifixion, and burial of Jesus (13:26-29). But as soon as Paul touches the low note of Jesus death, he responds with the positive affirmation of his resurrection from the dead (13:30). The crucified savior is none other than the exalted messiah! In the life of Jesus, both the suffering servant and exalted messiah are embodied. Jesus himself is the message of salvation, and his resurrection is its final and highest proof. This is the good news and the completion of all that God has promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and the prophets, and this is the full-orbed biblical-theological gospel message that Paul left with the Galatians (and us).
The question then becomes, what must I do in to know this Jesus, the risen king, and the triumphant savior? We will consider Paul’s conclusion tomorrow, but you can know for yourself today today: Acts 13.
Sola Deo Gloria, dss
Via Emmaus 